Omid Djalili is a rare comedian, capable of provoking huge laughter and profound thought at the same time. Yet he hasn’t toured for more than three years.

But all that is about to change. Omid is hitting the road with a new show, Tour Of Duty, which comes to Bradford next month, and says he’s raring to get back on the road.

Fizzing with energy, razor-sharp character comedy, killer lines and expertly-crafted cultural observations, Omid is an electrifying performer who has charmed audiences, critics and even other comics.

So what gave this talented British-Iranian comic the urge to hit the road again?

“Last Christmas I did a corporate gig, which can be notoriously difficult, and I was so nervous I couldn’t go on,” he recalls. “The organisers were getting nervous that I wouldn’t go on and cited all kinds of legality at me if I failed to perform. As I took to the stage my mind was telling me, ‘You’re going to die. You’re just a fat, needy man pleading for attention. You have no integrity and the act has no artistic merit. They don’t even like me’.

“I went out with that devil on my shoulder and on the other shoulder was another one going, ‘listen to the devil on the other shoulder, he’s right’. Then the opening joke got more laughs than I’d expected. I thought ‘Wow. I’m going on tour’.” He may have had a break from touring, but Omid has been far from idle. There was his own comedy show for BBC1, and he played Fagin in the West End production of Oliver!, appeared in US sitcom The Paul Reiser Show, and was in Howard Marks’s film, Mr Nice, and David Baddiel’s movie, The Infidel. I ask him to explain the title of the new live show, Tour Of Duty. “I put out a not-so-serious message on Twitter about what to call the show and I got about 200 responses, many of them very clever,” he says. “It hadn’t jumped out at me straight away, but I saw the very first response back was Tour Of Duty and I liked it.

“It reminded me of peacekeeping forces. Someone once said I was a bridge between East and West and I thought, ‘yes, I’m a bridge, and it’s about time I started charging a toll. £1 for cars, £2 for lorries and £17 for Smart cars. See how smart they feel now’.” Omid says the structure of the show is based on an Eleanor Roosevelt quote about different levels of thinking.

“She said, ‘Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, and small minds only talk about other people’. In stand-up, you do all those things – you talk about other people, you make sense of events and you elevate lofty ideas,” says Omid. “Once you have set up the concept that great minds think about ideas, then you can say things like, ‘Doesn’t Ed Milliband look like Wallace from Wallace and Gromit?’”

Omid isn’t afraid to tackle tricky political issues in his live act, not least the Middle East.

“After 9/11, I was saying, ‘Hold your horses. Not everyone in the Middle East is a terrorist. Leave Sikh people alone. They’re being attacked just because they wear turbans! They’ve got nothing to do with it’.

“I was trying to find sanity in the madness,” he says. “There are so many different levels to what’s happening in the Middle East now. With profound transformation in Egypt, Bahrain, Syria and Libya, the people of Dubai have a very British attitude to revolution; marching on the streets chanting ‘What do we want?’ Democracy! When do we want it? After Happy Hour!’”

While he likes to get audiences thinking, the showman in Omid also feels duty-bound to send them home with a warm glow.

“When I first saw stand-up comedy, watching a bloke in jeans and a T-shirt at the Comedy Store standing and talking, I used to think, ‘Oh for God’s sake, do something! Dance, change the lighting, do a few accents, sing’.

“There was nothing wrong with stand-up, it’s a noble art form, but I noticed every time I watched stand-up my sense of art and creativity was always outraged,” he says.

“I want people to come away with the feeling that yes, we’re all struggling, individually, as a society, culturally, globally, but we’re struggling together. And that’s a good thing. So why not dance or do something crazy at the end?

“I suppose it’s just following traditions like a ceilidh or shows in the Middle East that always end in a song or dance, but leave the audience with something, anything.”

* Omid Djalili is at St George’s Hall on January 20 at 8pm. For tickets, ring (01274) 432000.